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Underground > Creation >

How do you write?

Lilly Nowhere Late

18:22 / 27.09.05

So do you do? Think it out? Outline it? Become possessed by demons and offer your hands and keyboard or pen to do the dirty work? Trance? Plan? Go out in public? Lock yourself away? Travel? How do you do it? Do you write bits and let people read it or keep it all a big secret til it's marked as a masterpiece? And does it really irk you like it does me when
people assume they have a clue what you're on about before you even know? Do you ever finish anything? Do you're doing?

03:39 / 01.10.05

I can't believe nobody has replied to this.

I write by imagining the scene in my head. When I walk to the bus-stop, which is somewhat far away, I sometimes speak the dialogue out loud (my forte, i've come to realize, is hyperreal dialogue, akin to bendis-speak).

Also, when I'm in class, I keep two notebooks, one for notes for class, and one for the scene I'm writing. I don't usually do outlines for things, because I have a superheroic memory for things like that. So when I compose the dialogue out loud, I remember it for later. I don't need outlines because I can remember the entire arc in my head (I can also remember song lyrics and movie quotes with inhuman accuracy. But ask me to remember to take the laundry down, or empty the dishwasher, and I'll forget)

I write 75% of my stuff in longhand first. Then I type it in, editing it as I go along. The other 25% is usually short stories that I crank out in a couple evenings, and it doesn't require working on it during school.

My editing process is the part that hurts the most. I don't really edit. I need to, but I don't. I find that when I write a sentence, I'm pretty happy with it, so I don't change it. It hurts my work, but what can you do to break habits?

In terms of ideas, and where they come from, I usually see something in the world that interests me, and I try to find an unique angle about it. For example, I see a television show, and I see anger management classes, and I find something unique to say about it.... For my short stories, I tend to write them Joycean, that is to say, not a lot of plot, but a lot of dialogue.... So often, I randomly come up with sentences and I fit them together to sound nice.

But what I really want to know is how do other people write?

All Acting Regiment

18:31 / 01.10.05

In a perfect world, write in every way possible. That might sound like a cheap answer, but really you have to try everything if you're going to kee the fire burning.

Of course, due to silly stuff like work, personal safety etc you can't just go and experience a forest whenever you want.

08:02 / 03.10.05

What's hyperreal dialogue, and how's that better than real, or realistic, dialogue?

02:42 / 23.10.05

Heinlein is supposed to have said he never revised. Just the first draft and he was done. Personally, I don't believe a word of it. Macho posturing. And as for Matt, who can remember whole story arcs in his head, well . . . piffle. I'm too jealous to discuss it.

Me, I was told in the third grade that I had no imagination. (This while, quite quietly, in my own head, I was leading armies across snow-covered passes and winding up in other galaxies. I remember wondering what it would be like if I did have an imagination.)

So I didn't start writing until many years later, at which point I found out it's the most fun you can have by yourself. Since I had no practice, my first drafts were dreadful. They're still dreadful, but less so. The stuff usually starts to be readable by v. 3.0, and by 5.3 or so, it can be enjoyable. The single biggest factor in improving my work was joining writers' groups and having other people criticize my stuff, as well as critiquing theirs.

Because my writing is so unsatisfactory to start with, I find I just have to start slapping something down, any-old-how, and then fixing it later. Outlines are very hard to do, but if I don't have one, I go off on tangents which are great fun at the time but otherwise a total waste.

The results go in two directions: Hard science fiction, usually with a biological slant (because my other persona is evolutionary biologist). "Powered by Water" and "They Toil Not" are both relatively recent (read: have the benefit of practice). Social comment blog, which I started when government actions here in the US became so bad that silence might as well be consent.

03:36 / 23.10.05

What's hyperreal dialogue, and how's that better than real, or realistic, dialogue?

Realistic dialogue is, well, real. Hyperreal dialogue is ironic because of its realism. It's so real that it can't be real. Irony is the key. It's supposed to be funny.

ONLY NICE THINGS

10:55 / 23.10.05

Examples, please?

14:05 / 23.10.05

"Yeah, so I'm, like, twenty years old or something. I live in the capital of the province of Manitoba, being, like, Winnipeg or something. Yeah. Anyway, I'm currently in my, uh, fourth year of school at the, um, University of Winnipeg, or something like that. I'm getting an English degree, I guess, study some books or whatever."

It's not supposed to be taken seriously. The placement of the "um" or the "uh" denotes hesitation, being unsure of something. In the context of teenagers, whom I like to make fun of, it simply means a lack of a good lexicon. The addition of the "like" also adds some flavour, makes it seem more natural, but at the same time, it also takes the reader out of the moment; the reader says to himself, "Do people actually talk like this?"

I don't think this style of conversation would be good for a screenplay. I would cringe if I heard somebody say that out loud. I think it only works in a written, non-verbal medium. My only attempt at writing a play was disastrous; I'm good at dialogue, but when I try this, it sounds awful out loud.

14:11 / 23.10.05

I'd say that (early) Brian Michael Bendis and David Mamet both fall into the hyperreal category. The repetition (The repetition? Yeah, the repetition) is part of it: a sort of fragmentation of everyday speech patterns, reassembled into a sort of music—in Mamet's case, in particular. I was re-watching THE UNTOUCHABLES last night, so I'll give an example from that:

Malone: Why do you want to be a police officer?
Cadet: To protect the... people and the... p...
Malone: I'm not looking for the textbook answer. Why do you want to join the force.
Cadet: The force?
Malone: Yeah, why do you want to join the force.
Cadet: Because... I...
Malone: Yeah?
Cadet: ...think I could help.
Malone: You think you could help.
Cadet: ...with the force.

Nobody ever spoke like that in real life, but it's got the elements of real-life speech magnified just to the edge of parody.

And it's musical. Not in the Shakespearean sense—the language itself, the vocabulary and constructions, are relentlessly quotidian—but there's a careful attention to rhythm:

"I want him DEAD! I want his family DEAD! I want his house burned to the GROUND!"

"He pulls a KNIFE, you pull a GUN. He SENDS one of YOURS to the HOSpital, you SEND one of HIS to the MORGUE."

That's amphibrachic trimeter, fa chrissakes. Mamet's writing poetry and disguising it as prose. It's as artificial and calculated as blank verse, but it's made of the stuff of daily speech.

00:02 / 24.10.05

thanks for the defense (not sarcastic)

I wasn't trying to compare myself to the artiste known as Mamet. I'm nowhere near his brilliance.... I was comparing myself to (early) Bendis, like for example, Torso or Goldfish. That's hyperreal because it pulls you out of the narrative.